Year || 503 Season || Winter Temp || -10℉ (-23℃) to 55℉ (12℃) Weather || Winter has left a blanket of pristine white snow in many parts of Novus. Only Solterra remains mostly untouched by the season's frosted hold, but even the desert may feel a cold breath of wind now and then. With Winter now settled across the continent, dreams of Spring dance in the minds of many.

Together the girls now stand amidst the rolling grasses of the prairie. The meadow is a sea, and stems lap at Florentine’s legs. They tap against her skin, each one reminding her of a memory she might have hoped to forget.

But there is no forgetting when Denocte is full of ghosts. There are memories as twisted as the unicorn’s horn that spirals up into the sky. But none are as graceful as that horn and none are as beautiful as the sky that dances so high above.

The colours dance upon the other girl’s skin. Her mahogany coat is a black canvas in the midnight light. Upon it the myriad lights of the Borealis dance. Gold was no canvas for such a spectacle and so Florentine stands, gilded and plain in a land made for the beauty of the dark alone.

What stories did the girls possess? Oh Flroentine has many, so many she cannot remember them all. So many she has not yet lived out them all. Though infinite Time calls out to her from the edges. It whispers to its traveller girl. Yes, Florentine has too many stories and she never thinks to put any to tongue. So it is that intrigue has her stepping close. It has her eyes rising up the Night Queen’s spiral horn and up, up, up into the shifting sky.

“Hello Isra.” Florentine says to the song of stars and lights. Petals scatter, to fall upon the grasses and rest into the upturned palms of wild flowers. She follows them down upon bended knee, dropping into a curtsey she once made so sweetly. Ah, it is easier to offer a curtsey than to receive. So she does not linger long, but rises like the dawn sun and lets her eyes lift to a newer queen. “Do you have a story for me?” Her head tilts, curious, her lips holding a smile so secret. “I believe I must thank you for saving, Lysander. Since becoming mortal he cannot be trusted to keep himself alive. So the battle continues.”

And it is with that that Florentine comes to rest beside the Night Queen, her gaze tipped up to the sky. “Please make it a good story...” The girl whispers, “One enough to show me that my brother’s decision to bring us here was not in vain.”

Isra of the flood & rot
“It was a strange feeling, like touching a void.”

Lights wander above her head in wild colors formed of patterns that she can never hope to understand. Isra wanders with them, her thoughts as feral and free as the landscape of lights. Her hooves walk not through weeds and golden grass but through nebulous bands of sea where colors dance about her like curtains of silk.

The sky is her earth and the earth her sky. The trees seem like pillows and and they sing to her through the night-wind like sirens. Lay your head down and dream. Our roots and out bark will keep you safe. And then then the sky (which is not a sky anymore) chants to her, go on, go on. Discover all the secrets of the wild lights. Each world reaches out to her and Isra bleats like a lost lamb with both want and fear, bravery and foolishness.

And while she's lost the world is lost with her. The grass beneath her shifts to stalks of emerald and citrine that bend and sway on strange joints made of copper. Her hooves rest not on loam but mirrors that reflect the dancing light and the way it makes her scales ripple and move like fish skimming across the sea of her skin. Everything around her becomes made of the sky as much as it is made of loam and rock and water.

It's all lovely in it's indecision, perfect in the between.

Florentine speaks and the spell of the wild lights and the pillow trees is broken. Isra sinks back down to the earth and shakes her horn through the darkness as if only just now remembering that she is a unicorn and the mortal coil is her forest. The citrine grass turns gold and becomes as fragile as stalks of wheat and weed should be. The mirrors shift and change until they are nothing but stone and dirt and plainness. And her voice when she joins in the breaking of the silence seems less lovely for the normalcy around her. “Florentine. I hoped you would find me.”

Isra dips her horn in respect, a flourish as quiet as it is sad. “I would have saved anyone on the mountains. But it is good to know that he is loved.” Something in her gaze whispers that she know what it is to love something that might seem either like a dream or something that is mortal enough for death to desire. “Of course I have a story for you.” Isra wishes she knew how to wink or smile, to make it seem like the world is full of nothing more than joy and folly and dreaming.

That is when she knows exactly what story it is that bubbles up in her belly and rises to her throat like a hot spring.

“One year, not so long ago, there was a storm that lasted for an entire spring. The rains ever ended and thunder rolled through the sky like a stampede of buffalo and antelope. At night the rains sometimes cooled and fell from the sky in the form of crystals and hail and the moon glinted off them like a dream of something lovely. The trees were plagued with a rot that started in their roots and rose both slowly and painfully to the branches and then to the leaves.

The world was drowning, and all the animals who ran for high ground called it 'the coming', the flood, the end of their time. They all though the sky had forsaken them and that the earth was happy to watch them all drown in rivers and wash away to the bottom of the sea.” Isra pauses, inhales, and watches the queen, wondering if she can still taste sulfur and silt on her lips and feel water weighing down her wings like a hundred pounds of steel.

“Only the owls were content with all the rain. For the clouds blotted out the sun until the day was night and the night was night. They loved that darkness and they watched the waters for rodents and snakes that rushed right past their branches like a buffet of food.

But there was one young owl that felt sadness for the drowning of his prey and wondered when the skies had learned to hate the forest. And so instead of eating all the drowning field mice, until he burst with greed, he saved them. With his wings and talons he carried them up to the branches and showed them how to live off of the trees not yet dead from rot.

But that is not the greatest thing that the young owl did. It wasn't until the rains stopped that his story truly began--”

Isra exhales, looks at the wild-lights then at Florentine and then at the grass tickling their bellies that has turned to the long soft, down of owl feathers.

Florentine has seen so many things. So many worlds has she traversed that there is little that can surprise her any more. But so much still delights her. So much can still tug at her heartstrings and made her heart sing its fateful song.

It is, therefore, only a smile that crosses her lips as a golden stem turns emerald. It is wonderment that glimmers in her curious gaze when the soil turns to mirrors. She watches herself watching the world turn and twist and change.

Her heart falls out of rhythm. It skips like rocks upon water, the push of blood that throbs with want. The air, oh the air! She drinks and drinks the cool, cool breeze – but there is nothing. There is no bitter twang of mischievous magic. There is no sour taste of ancient, twisted Time and its magic twin.

No, this magic is something else, but it is a whisper of the Rift. It sighs and whispers of a magic that leeches from the spaces in between worlds. Florentine knows this magic, she was made of such ancient power. Her skin is a tapestry of thread, bound together by fate and time. History of gold dust upon her skin, the future the gleam of light that blinks with anticipation.

The traveller girl watches it all. She watches this place of rotten memories fall away to nothing at all. In its place blossoms a world that should not be. It is a world where the sky falls down to kiss the earth, claim it as its own, but oh the earth transcends the sky’s touch. Down is up and up is down and Floretnine bites her tongue as her stomach twists. Her father is a phantom memory here, a needle in her stomach, a sword in her heart.

But oh the beauty this world has become is enough to soothe the ache of Florentine’s loss. Her skull turns to the shadow queen and all at once this mysterious world is gone. All at once this place and its familiar truths come creeping back. They are unwanted memories, but Florentine came here for a story and that is what she gets.

The Unicorn Queen’s tale is spoken like a song. It fills the air with a music, mysterious and enchanting. Florentine closes her eyes, all the better to welcome such words that will carry her away. Her neck is light; her dagger is gone. Lysander she thinks and Isra names him. The Dusk girl’s eyes open and settle their amethyst gaze upon the new Night Queen.

He is loved.

And Florentine does not deny it.

But the story. Oh yes, it closes Florentine’s eyes for just a moment before they open once again. She watches the magic queen and smiles, small and slow. “Make it.” She asks, in challenge, in wonder.

“I was born in a place where magic was twisted and wrong. But it was beautifully wild and changeable too. Make your story for me, won’t you?”

And Florentine closes her eyes, for only there are owls with lunar eyes and waters that rise and rise and rain that falls, silver and heavy.

Isra in the black-wheat
“ What does he see and what does he know that the rest of the world is missing?”

Isra's eyes, for a moment, darken as the breeze sings through the owl feathers tickling their bellies. The darkness of her eyes when they turn away from the horizon and look only to Florentine seem to be a voice of their own. Oh, greedy queen, those pits of dark sea blue chide. Are the feathers against your legs not enough?

But Isra blinks away the darkness and all the starlight returns when she says, “I suppose it is in our nature to want. I will try to do the old, twisted magic of your world justice.” Perhaps her words sound a little sharper when she inhales and asks, “Shall I continue?” She has no intention of waiting though, for the story is banging against the back of her teeth like a hammer.

And so she exhales and the words pour out like rain and like a flood form her lips.

Each of her words begs the grass to change, the soil to become and the air to dream of winter and snow and color. “It was at the highest hour of the day that the rains stopped and the black clouds rolled back like the tide. Across the sky a rainbow arched and cut through the blue-sky like a blade of color.” Around them the grass turns from feathers to stalks of blue, red, yellow, purple and something that seemed almost like sea-green. The soil beneath turns to silver-dust and gold-dust and all the colors seem a chorus of rainbow light when the moon shifts through a cloud above them.

“When the saved prey looked out from their walls of rotten, dying leaves they sung in joy to see a rainbow instead of a sea of rainwater and silt. The mice chanted of utopia and the chipmunks of bounty. But the young owl saw only a rainbow and none of the wonder. He saw not a pathway to some other world but just color. He turned to the mice and the chipmunks and said, “Why do you sing? It is only a shimmer of the sun through the lingering moisture of the air. There is nothing for you there and in a few minutes the rainbow will be gone.” His new friends that owed him so much, knew then what give they could exchange for their second-chances

And so the small prey animals smiled at the owl and their lips started to part from around those smiles and magic started to pour out like the now gone rain.” The moon shifts back behind a cloud but the stars and the wild-light flare brighter in that burst of darkness.

“Has anyone ever told you, Florentine, that owls have always been the most scientific of all the nocturnal birds? Did you know that when they sleep during the day strange things happen to their dreams because the sun rules the sky instead of the moon?” All the stalks at their feet turn black as a moonless night. Isra tucks her legs beneath her, beds down in that darkness and her eyelids flutter like hummingbird wings.

Around her the black stalks bloom with soft silver seeds that shift between looking star-silver and moon-silver. Isra closes her eyes and when the night breeze comes again the paper-thin seeds let loose from their black-wheat beds and drift away like a million tiny wishes.

Yes, Isra, Florentine is greedy. She hungers and craves where she should not. She wants and is selfish enough to let that want take precedence and in its wake rudeness flourishes like a rose with thorns.

This is the traveller girl who craves stories like fish yearn for water. She sets her amethyst eyes upon Isra and waits the tale to unravel more. To listen is to drown in words and fantasy. Forgive this girl her greedy ways.

Florentine does not shy from the seablue eyes that chide her. But she does lower her lips to the feathers that sway against her limbs. Oh they are as silent as owl wings should be. It is only as they move en mass that Flora realizes how loud the meadows once were. They are a roar to the silence of this feathered field.

All is gold and silver at her feet – turning the earth into a gilded mask. The grasses are no longer feathers, but stems once again. They glow with rainbow colours – all that a sky could dream and forge from rain and sun and arching rainbows.

She does not lift her lips as this sea changes, but wonders at the soft and sharp, the silence and the roar. The story pours on in colour and life. It changes the world with Isra’s magic and Florentine is too greedy to close her eyes. For could her mind create anything akin to this world?

The grasses set with an invisible sun and turn black as night. Stars flicker where there should be none and all is night and darkness. The meadow knows not time beneath the whisperings of this queen’s magic.

“I did not know.” Florentine says of owls with sunlight dreams and fickle rainbows. Now she lifts her head, as if finally rising from a dream world of wonder and splendor. “What do they say their dreams are of?” Florentine asks, and does not think it is of mice or voles.

When the east wind blows, seeds take flight like stars. They drift as wishes might, gathered together, a cloud of desire, soon to be dispersed. Soon to be made true? Of that Florentine is not too sure.

Isra with butterflies on her cheeks
“with eyes blinking uncontrollably they gazed at each other one by one"

“I've yet to find an owl willing to tell me.” Isra smiles beneath her fluttering, weary eyelids and for as long as it takes for a start to fall above there heads she is the brightest of things in the meadow. There is something in the way her voice barely hides a hint of slyness and youthful impishness that hints at all they things she could have been. Before fate took her soul and crushed it like ancient porcelain, Isra could have been a little like Florentine. She could have been like the sea, wild with a world beneath her.

Now there is only a world inside her, wonder and words and nothing of wildness.

She sighs and lets the darkness and the wind fold over her like icy silks. They lend her strength and she takes up once more the mighty mantle of her tale. This time it's mostly words, her magic still aches softly from changing the meadow over and over again. “At first the young owl was deaf to the
magic of the prey. He could only hear chaotic chirps and chatters as each of the mice talked over themselves. Suddenly his hole in the tree didn't feel like a peaceful haven anymore. He might have thought a little about eating them all then and there. And if he did the story would end here.”

Isra opens her eyes to see that the meadow is just grass and wheat again, soft stalks that tap a muted song against her skin in the breeze. “Eventually the mice realized that they were making little sense to the owl and they all quieted at once. Then the oldest of them walked forward and bowed his head like a price before the owl and started to tell a story...” Here she pauses, inhales and her voice turns to something like smoke, heavy and ephemeral.

““There's a story in our culture,” the oldest mouse started and he spoke with edges as smooth as a blade of grass. “that has been passed down to generation after generation of mice. My own grandfather called it the promised land at the end of the rainbow. None of us have seen it, for mice are tiny and the distance to the bottom of a rainbow has ever been to great for us to reach.” And here the owl turned his head too look at the rainbow arching across the world outside his hollow tree. His eyes had never been so large as as they were at that moment, wide with wonder and magic and possibility. The oldest mouse watched him with a smile on his tiny, dry lips. And oh he knew what thoughts were rushing through the owl's mind!” Isra pauses, still weary and fluttering. The meadow is still just a meadow and all the wonder is in her words alone.

But what wonder it is-- of mice and magic and promises.

“Would you like to finish the story Florentine?” That youthful smile makes an appearance again and for tonight she's more unicorn than queen.